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ANNO·​VICESIMO·​NONO·​DIE·​TRECENTESIMO·​TRICESIMO·​VITÆ·​POVYA
LivingReverseIconic
Living Reverse Iconic

Of the many deep things about my reflections towards this life I have, has been something I realized recently. And I believe if Maestro McLuhan was alive to see this day; he would have been fascinated to see. This thing is the reverse direction of Iconic world Maestro McLuhan saw.

To him the world of electric age was all about “Icons”! The fairly interesting thing about my life has been just how much Icon was in there. A good portion of my life was lived through the absorption of Iconic language.

a drawing showing a person holding a remote or controller looking at a television screen which displays a flower, with an arrow pointing from a camera filming real flowers towards the TV, illustrating the mediation of reality

I lived in a world; isolated by all means from the “Real” world the rest of the people around this planet experienced.

Imagine if you were born on the surface of the moon. If that had happened to you; how would you understand the world around you? Media then would have become your whole reality.

a series of five hand-drawn sketches representing mediated images: a suspension bridge, a mountain peak resembling Mt. Fuji, a figure standing before a large celestial body or moon, a cargo ship on the water, and a helicopter

Living like this is important in that you live different realities. In those times in Iran I had to live both profiles of the inner life and outer life of an Iranian. Internally I believed in no God and externally I had to study Islam; internally I used to believe in the stupidity of my culture and externally I had to be a conformist.

This was even further intensified by the fact that my Dad had lived outside of Iran; and even in his childhood had not participated in a school with Iranian cultures.

My Mom too; lived in a culture and family very detached from the realities of her culture. This detachment; very early on gave me a form of alienation that was put to its limits when our family friends migrated to outside of Iran after the Green Movement.

There, one thing that happened was this effect becoming the main theme of my life. I knew that I did not belong to this culture; and I don’t belong to any other. Culture became a very fluid and dynamic part of me that felt like a transgender person realizing their body does not belong to them; or perhaps they don’t belong to their body.

a drawing showing a single hatched silhouette figure isolated and standing in the gap between two separate crowds of outlined figures
In my school; I couldn't answer anything obvious about our culture; I didn't know a single famous Iranian singer's song. People would have

But how? Are you from outside of Iran? And the answer was no! Then they would have thought I am crazy.

a row of various geometric shapes (triangle, circle, square, hexagon, star, inverted triangle, oval, parallelogram) with a hand pointing to an irregular, cloud-like shape drawn in the middle, suggesting a choice outside the standard options

This however was also nice; because when you don’t have something forced upon you; you can have it for yourself. Not belonging to a culture meant that I could both choose my cultures and even make them. I could identify myself as a free software activist and have it be my identity.

an additional figure on the side shows a television, an open book, and a photograph/envelope with an arrow pointing into it

For someone in the 80’s of Iran (in Farsi decades; let’s better say it as 2005–2015), in all of its cultural problems; this meant the symbolic world as the whole world. I lived in the fragmented image world of Guy Debord ’s Spectacle and I could sense it with all of my bones.

a diagram showing 'The Whole of Life' as a large circle, with a smaller section labeled 'Fragments that can be Abstracted' being extracted, turned into 'Portions written in text' (represented by small squares), and then fed via an arrow into the block letters 'LLM'

Something written to a human is a partial external memory device. The whole of the situation remains in the mind and then a portion of it is offloaded in the text. We understand things like “Danger” and “Love” internally and the word is only there to transmit a known symbol to others.

But then the interesting part is that; these fragmented little captures of reality (again the Spectacle) is everything to an LLM. To the machine it is everything that makes the world meaningful and then perhaps; in order for the LLM to simulate the next entry in the Spectacle; it has to imagine the core of it so good that it actually simulates

It without ever having lived in it or seen it.

The same thing had happened to me. Sometimes I would have thought — through the perspective of someone native to something — that entity X/Y is not correct. I would have thought like “This icon in the Maps software of iOS 6 is so not Jobs”. I felt I could understand exactly how Jobs’s taste was and knew it better than anybody else, and then I would have realized that actually I’m a nobody living in an isolated nowhereland. Yet to understand the world outside the pictures I had to simulate them and thus I felt I own them.

This is very much like the movie “Legend of 1900” where — spoilers; 1900 had never left the ship but understood the land way better than anyone else. I also get reminded of Gatsby who would have looked at the green light from Daisy’s house and feel it is unreachable.

To me as well the same happened. And Icons were perhaps the full vocabulary of my language. I excelled at design and composition and language and anything else transmitted through electrical media since they were not a notation of my universe; but “My Whole Universe”. And these made me understand that inside the internet I act differently because “I am a different person” not the physical Pouya. I understood how “Mediums are Environments” natively.

This brings me to the more interesting part of the argument. In the reality of my life; everything is — in design terms — simplified. Because I like icons and that is fairly strange. I lived — for quite some time — inside the spectacle and therefore what I had in the “real” world has to adhere to my “real” world: how do you get there? Well; By making things in the physical world look symbolic.

And that has been the whole way of my life.

a process diagram showing four stages of a flower's representation: 'A real flower' leads to a 'Photograph of a flower,' which leads to an 'Icon of a flower,' which finally leads to 'A toy of the icon of the flower,'

I very much love to have physical things made of Icons (my native language / world). But then; recently I have realized I have been working on making the real from those Icons. And therefore “Going Back To Live In The Physical World I Saw From The Spectacle”.

a large return arrow looping from the final stage back to the beginning of the previous drawing

And this has been a crazy thing. I no longer live in a fully symbolic world. I live in a physically “Manufactured World” to bring the world captured in my symbolic universe to reality. This is not Iran and it is not the rest of the world. But, it is physically real.

Day's Context
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